Our Story Begins:
Listen to the Music (6 Years) (VIDEO)
Six years.
That’s how long my journey on this new life has been. Six full years as of this moment since I watched my wife pass away.
That’s not author’s flourish or fiction, by the way, I had to watch her go and it was a wound that took years to heal. The scar still remains somewhere deep inside me, though it only acts up with the phantom pains of grief occasionally now. As ever, it’s not the big days that make that scar hurt, it’s the unexpected and forgotten things that hit and hurt.
Andrea Andrews (Manoucheri) was a force of nature. Our marriage was filled with both love and volatility. Regardless, the picture of us in love and kissing up there reminds me of good times.
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In the first many years I put together videos with my kids. The first was painful and sad. The second year, in 2013, was angry. In 2014 we were so far into our lives, without realizing it, we had created a video that show how far down the road from Andrea we’d actually moved. In those first days, in the fog and defeat of grief you barely make one foot go in front of the other. One day at a time is a credo and reality and you do it because you have to do it.
Then a kid goes to college, or high school. They graduate. They move forward. I met the most amazing woman and we started dating. Our stories all began again . . . together.
Related: Our Story Begins: The Strange Benefit Of Single Parenting
This year the kids asked me to do one more video. Instead of doing it alone, though, we reached out to the small population of friends and beloved people who helped us get here and had them help. Using a song the kids have known since they were tiny – the Doobie Brothers’ “Listen to the Music”, we recorded our own version and asked them to help us. The result, to me, is touching.
Music, true friends, and loved ones helped us heal. As I tell the kids, we’re stronger together than when we’re apart . . . and we are. So celebrate how wonderfully trying our last years have been and join us listening to the music.
